OVERVIEW SPAIN IN FREEDOM: 50 YEARS
The Restless Anniversary:
Reflecting on Dictatorship, Transition, and Democracy without Heroics
Kostis Kornetis Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Academic Advisor of the Commissioner for the Commemoration of“ Spain in Freedom: 50 years”
The word‘ restless’ in this article’ s title echoes Inquietud. Libertad y democracia, the exhibition that recently opened at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. That show refuses the comfort of a tidy timeline. Instead, it stages a conversation across the Peninsula: Portugal’ s April 25 glances at Spain’ s post-Franco dusk; the memory of colonial war unsettles Spanish silences; documentary photography and essay film turn commemoration into debate. This piece adopts the same stance— less celebration, more friction.
Fifty years on, the task is not to refurbish a heroic tale of the transitions. It is to ask how to narrate them without shortcuts: how to hold together rupture and continuity, elite bargains and pressure from below, official ceremony and lived memory. Setting close histories side by side restores complexity and reminds us that democracy— like the memory that sustains it— is not an ending but a practice.
From templates to texture
For years we leaned on a convenient template: Portugal as rupture tipping toward revolution; Greece as abrupt collapse followed by the trials of the Colonels; Spain as negotiated reform anchored in consensus. Useful as scaffolding— but flattening in effect. Over the last two decades, historians have moved beyond transitology’ s chessboard of leaders and“ pacts,” recovering the social underlay and cultural tempos that institutional accounts compressed. We’ ve shifted from tidy typologies to thick description.
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Observing Memories ISSUE 9